Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/140

 103 HISTORY OF GREECE. various ways, and confined in a loathsome dungecn. Unable to take care of her two children, she had been compelled to expose them immediately on their birth in a little boat on the river Enipeus ; they were preserved by the kindness of a herdsman, and when grown up to manhood, rescued their mother, and revenged her wrongs by putting to death the iron-hearted Sidero. 1 This pathetic tale respecting the long imprisonment of Tyro ia substituted by Sophokles in place of the Homeric legend, which represented her to have become the wife of Kretheus and mother of a numerous offspring. 2 Her father, the unjust Salmoneus, exhibited in his conduct the most insolent impiety towards the gods. He assumed the name and title even of Zeus, and caused to be offered to himself the sacrifices destined for that god : he also imitated the thunder and lightning, by driving about with brazen caldrons attached to his chariot and casting lighted torches towards heaven. Such wicked- ness finally drew upon him the wrath of Zeus, who smote him with a thunderbolt, and effaced from the earth the city which he had founded, with all its inhabitants. 3 Pelias and Neleus, "both stout vassals of the great Zeus," became engaged in dissension respecting the kingdom of lolkos in 1 Diodorus, iv. 68. Sophoklfe's, Fragm. 1. TvpiJ. Sn^of I,i6rjpu> Kal $- povaa Tovvofta. The genius of Sophokles is occasionally seduced by this play upon the etymology of a name, even in the most impressive scenes of his tragedies. See Ajax, 425. Compare Hellanik, Fragm. p. 9, ed. Preller There was a first and second edition of the Tyro TTJC devri-paf Tvpovf. Schol. ad Aristoph. Av. 276. See the few fragments of the lost drama in Dindorf s Collection, p. 53. The plot was in many respects analogous to the Antiop6 of Euripides. 2 A third story, different both from Homer and from Sophokles, respecting; Tyro, is found in Hyginus (Fab. Ix.) : it is of a tragical cast, and borrowed, like so many other tales in that collection, from one of the lost Greek dramas. 3 . Apollod. i 9, 7. Zahfiuvevf r' udtKOf Kal {>Trepdvfj.of Heptjypj/f. Hcsiod, Fragm. Catal. 8. Marktscheffel. Where the city of Salmoneus was situated, the ancient investigators wero not agreed ; whether in the Pisatid, or in Elis, or in Thessaly (see Strabo, viii. p. 356). Euripides in his JEolus placed him on the banks of the Alpheius (Eurip. Fragm. JEol. I). A village and fountain in the Pisatid bore the name of Salmone ; but the mention of the river Enipeus seems to mark Thessaly as the original seat of the legend. But the nalvet& of the told preserved by Apollodorus (Virgil in the JCneid, vi. 586, has retouched U